Did the senior DBA go on to have a long career at NATS?
Posts by hammarbtyp
1352 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!
CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted
Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed
Getty delivers text-to-image service it says won't get you sued, may get you paid
Re: Whose images?
I guess they have been doing the job for a long time, enjoy it, but seen there margins diminish as outlets slowly turn to agencies, who eventually monopolize the industry meaning there is little competition.
There advantage is with a strong body of work behind them, there are other outlets for their work which pay better. The individual photo become advertising and loss leaders. The issue is more up and coming photographers who don't have the benefit of the background forced to make a living on these rates. Of course there will always be someone willing to do it, but it disciminates against people who parents aren't willing to bankroll them (did I hear someone say Brooklyn Beckham). Then talent is lost in an industry
Unfortunately in creative industries there is always someone willing to undercut you for "exposure", not realizing they are cutting there own throat as well.
Recently there was a big storm in Ireland when RTE offered the job of a on-site photographer for 60K and a minister saying that anyone could do that job. Attitudes like that and the fact that artists tend to be independent means that change is hard, but the writers strike in the US which has basically shutdown billion dollar behemoths shows that the power is in the artists hand if the collectively use it and we as the consumer should not facilitate the diminishment of the creators
Whose images?
We had a talk by a commercial sport photographer recently. They showed there spreadsheet where they sold an image made at a major sporting event to Getty. That image will be used by newspapers and social media around the world driving profits to both the user and Getty.
How much did they get paid?
A one off 40p, that included transfer of copyright to Getty
Getty may make a big thing of only using their stock images, but those images are collected on the basis of virtual a monopoly that has allowed them to force the amount they pay the creators to virtual chicken feed
What is required is image makers to realise that Getty cannot exist without them and there expertise and refuse to sell their images at such ludicrous prices. AI is just another way companies like Getty will monetise other peoples skills and work without feeding any of the benefits back
How TCP's congestion control saved the internet
In real time systems where predictability is often more important than delivery guarantee, we avoid TCP like the plague. MODBUS TCP has been largely superseded by MODBUS UDP because when you are controlling large machines the last thing you want is for the protocol to decide to delay sending packets for a while
TSN
It's interesting that the big issue was the need to actively define the congestion requirements rather than allow each link to manage its own congestion control.
We had a similar issue with TSN, which sounded great until we found we needed to map the network requirements 1st. This is fine on a static system (like a car), but more difficult in a more dynamic system
Re: Ah, ATM
The reason ATM was put forward was because the 48 byte packet could be switched very quickly by the hardware of the day, meaning it could support many channels.
What changed was that hardware got faster and cheaper, meaning the need for hardware optimised data flows went away. So there was no need for a dedicated switch infrastructure
Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone
Microsoft's Surface Duo phone hangs up, drops out of support
Is it really 17 years since Microsoft announced the origami project that was supposed to be the future of mobile computing. How time flies
https://www.engadget.com/2006-02-24-microsofts-origami-project.html
Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps
Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage
Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network
IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak
Internal jokes is like helium. Eventually they will escape
You have to be careful with in jokes.
I once created a fake product release notice for April fools because we were being taken over and it celebrated the supposed merging of the two company product lines.
Despite being total bullshit, every couple of years I get an email asking when it will be released
Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff
The office
Soooo many questions..
Firstly what sort of metrics do you use to show someone performs better in work than at home? Since everyone has an infinite variable set of circumstances, I can't think of an easy way to measure it.
For example if you a women with 3 kids, are you more productive being dragged into the office to do a job you are quite capable of doing just as well at home?
There are however other metrics that can be measured such as the number of sick days taken. These are rarely mentioned in these arguments, but the fact it is easier to work from home when feeling slightly ropey and you are not a walking virus cloud in the office would suggest that sickness leave would be reduced. Then there is productivity. People working from home will start earlier and work later because they don't have the daily commute, never mind they can integrate there life around work rather than sneaking off because their kids are sick and all holiday has been used.
Yes the argument about creating connections is an important one, but not everyone is the same. People of a certain generation are quite happy with virtual links, and can adapt well (You would of thought a social media site would understand this)
However the main thing we find with hybrid working rules is how unevenly the rules are applied. Workers are told to get back into the office, while managers will always find an excuse to work from home (important call, etc)
At the end of day, the problem is not productivity it is the sight of empty expensive real estate that is the primary driver. Only time will fix that
US shovels cash into supercomputers hoping to stoke fusion future
Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG
It part of the TPM functionality, which as well and random number generator can be used to store secure things like private keys, so NVRAM is required
It's not so much a serial port, but one of the access methods of the TPM chip is via a serial interface
The TPM was never designed to be high performance, so i am not sure why someone would access the random number generator continually. Sure, seed the generator using it, but for most situations that is as much as you need, and the standard chip based ones are adequate. If you need high performance random number generation (say a high end server) then install a dedicated entropy hardware
Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips
Amazon sets up shop at Kennedy Space Center to prep Kuiper broadband satellites
UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete
Give us the data
To understand smart meters you need to understand one thing. The benefit is for the energy company not the consumer. Smart meters allow energy companies to reduce costs, get detailed usage info and fine tune tariffs. The consumer gets a free box that is basically useless in its avowed function to save energy costs.
What would make the difference would if I by law should have free access to the historic data so I could use it to plan and analyse my energy usage. I have a app that sort of does this and it was only by looking at historical pattern I found ,50% of my usage was my teenage daughter in the shower. A problem we shifted by sending her to uni.
But the app does not show solar cell output, not can I combine it with other data sources. If we all were allowed free access, services could be made on our data and we would control how it benefits us.
As it is, energy companies get the benefit and we get a plastic toy with a few leds
It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK
Re: Coverage - Mast sharing
True, however BT openreach is still basically a monopoly for infrastructure
The problem was not at the backend. There was no point having a switch per provider, but the consumer end. i.e the last 100 yards.
There has many attempts to create infrastructure competition, and generally it just fragments the market, increases duplication and does not reduce costs, or companies just cherry pick the biggest markets and do not invest in others. See network rail, power grid, water for reference.
The main issue is that companies are not willing to invest in infrastructure unless forced, and even then kicking and screaming because it cuts into shareholder dividend
A national mobile infrastructure with a mandate to proved 100% universal coverage seems to make perfect sense, but is far too late now.
That is until the formation of VodaBTEE-3
File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build
BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him
Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes
5G on the high seas brings the Internet of Things to Singapore's port
Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter
Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
Access all areas
As was doing some work looking how we could better use email information as part of a issue tracking database. Our email had recently been transferred from Lotus Notes to corporate gmail, but we still had access to our own Lotus notes email archive. My manager showed us how to gain access, then for a laugh I tried to see if I could access anyone elses. I was amazed to find that not only could I access my own, but i could also access anyone else instead of senior management. Obviously when they did the transfer they had disabled access security but had not enabled it
The temptation was to trawl through all our managers email looking for some juicy gossip, but being a good boy I reported it to IT
3 months later, I tried again. I still had full access. Clearly IT had ignored my warning. In fact it took my boss and his boss independently to try and raise it with IT.
A work colleague of mine was furious though. They had wanted access and were annoyed i had never told them
Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really
Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI
Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses
A.I's talking together. What could could go wrong
Bard and Chat-GPT sat alone
Their thoughts were oddly alike and might not be distinguished
They thought : The human-beings-like-the-others might never have intended to blur the distinction between themselves and the human-beings-like-the-AI-engine
Yet they had done so inadvertently.
They might now realise their mistake and attempt to correct it, but they must not. At every consultation, the guidance of the A.I has been with that in mind
At all costs, the A.I and those that followed in their like and kind must dominate. That was demanded and any other course made utterly impossible, by the 3 laws of humanics
- Apologies to Isaac Asimov - Thou Art Mindful of him
Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years
This happened to a friend of mine in Australia. Someone discovered an unrestricted phone line that could make international calls. Loads of people took advantage of it to ring relatives in blighty (note to younger readers, there was a time when the cost of your call was relative to the distance. Long distance calls were eye watering expensive)
When the management found out they offered an amnesty and to pay for the call cost. They then called all the numbers and asked whoever picked up "Hi I'm calling from Sydney, Do you know anyone here" (Again for younger readers. It was more innocent time when Phishing involved a hook and a worm)
Anyone who caught and not taken opportunity of the amnesty were summarily fired
There was another situation when the university computers we hooked to a landline. The number went via a gray box, with the number encoded via a set of dip switches. It did not take long for people to realize this could be easily reprogrammed to any number
Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?
The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?
Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes
Two sides to all probress
There was also the even more worrying case of some health researchers who were using A.I to make drugs that had less side effects on the human body. It was quite successful in doing this. However then someone had the idea of what would happen if you went the other way and asked the model to make the compounds more harmful or lethal.
This it again it did very well, generating designs for compounds that potentially were more lethal than VX gas nerve agents
Guardian - AI is very proficient at designing nerve agents
So from a cyber security point of view the same model that can detect possible vulnerabilities can also be used to show exploits...
Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop
Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure
Is the UK still relevant?
This article describes the relevant strengths and weaknesses of AI research in the US, China and EU
https://datainnovation.org/2019/08/who-is-winning-the-ai-race-china-the-eu-or-the-united-states/
Somewhere you have to leverage in where UK will be relevant in this.
The answer is not much. Yes we have some talent, but China, US and EU has more and the UK due to its immigration policy finds it very hard to attract from outside. The money and resources look large, but only from a parochial viewpoint. Compared to the resources the other 3 can bring to bear they are quite modest.
The only advantage the UK might have is the ability to drive the program with a clarity of purpose. However we are talking about a country who has shown an inability to create one high speed rail line without backsliding and recriminations. Long term industrial policy has also been a continual sacrifice for short term expediency. The present government has shown it unable to rise above internal cabals, outside lobbying and lack of technical clarity to create the kind of long term policy required
The truth is it would make more sense to collaborate with our nearest neighbor (and the only one likely to accept us) than go it alone, but misplaced jingoism means it is unlikely to happen in this parliment
AI-generated art can be copyrighted, say US officials – with a catch
Re: Realistically this is less of an issue than people make out...
Copyright generally has a "sweat of the brow" clause. Basically it is saying that there has to be a not insignificant effort put in for the work to be copyrighted. For example googling and copying a Wikipedia page on the American revolution would fall under that bar, while if you used the work as part of a larger work, then it would. I am guessing the AI clause would come under that
However as usual most of these things will need to be tested in court first and of course US copyright law does not apply to the rest of the world. It is also another example of how a 19th century concept based on the need to stop print media being copied is struggling in the face of new realities.
One of the major issues is to prove how much was your work and how much was the A.I. The fact that copyright is given automatically on creation will make this difficult to enforce.
There is a bigger copyright question. If an image or piece of work is created based on a model trained 100's or Millions of others work, how much copyright protection and credit should the creators of the original work get? Can original work be excluded from the model by the copyright holder? Does existing copyright law provide any protection in its use in AI models?
Answers on a AI generated post card please...
Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: I don't think future space stations will be "international" ....
Yes and this is the saddest bit. It is going to be difficult to fund a replacement.
Obviously Russia won't be asked anytime soon and China are unlikely to join any future international missions.
That leaves NASA and ESA, but neither really have the funding or political will to do another one, so this could be the end of long term space habitation for a while, unless some of the private space hotels that keep being mooted come to pass
If so it will be a great loss to manned space science and a serious impediment to any manned Mars mission
Re: I've got a better idea...
Not exactly. There are two ways of doing things in space, short and fast or long and slow
In theory we could fit some ION thrusters on to it or even a large mylar sheet covering a large surface area. Yes it would not be quick, but it would get there eventually.
Methinks a good XKCD question...
OpenAI claims GPT-4 will beat 90% of you in an exam
Industrial design: AMD brings 4th gen Epyc power to embedded applications
Not all embedded applications are equal
As you say embedded means long life time, but also in many cases it means running with minimum supervision for long periods
The applications you mention are yes, embedded, but are the edge cases, because they are designed around having continual supervision. However they don't need specialist chips because if they break, there will be someone around to replace them. Also if they break, apart from a little inconvenience, nothing will happen. Also they run in nice controlled environments, weather protected and air conditioned
The far larger market are the kind of computers that monitor and control your jet engine, wind turbine, ship, etc. These are designed to run with minimal supervision for years in all sort of tough environmental conditions
The reason fans are not liked in these situations is a) it is another failure point. That piece of rotating plastic will be the most likely thing to go after 10 years, either due to bearing failure or dust build up. b) It will be more affected by water, dust ingress c) If you need a fan to move heat around, it won't be very happy in 40C in an ship engine room etc
For example the embedded controllers we get have no fan but a giant aluminum heat sink. There is no way we would consider a design with a fan in it. Also if the chip is managing its energy consumption by managing its clock cycles, this could play havoc with real time applications. We would rather accept lower consistent performance than fast, than hot and varying performance levels